BAKU, Azerbaijan – Charles Leclerc insisted Ferrari’s winless run this year has not diminished his belief in the team or his determination to bring the glory days back to Maranello.
Despite lofty expectations coming into the season Ferrari has fallen well short of competing with the dominant McLaren team.
Leclerc won three times in 2024 but has had to settle for one pole position and five podium finishes — teammate Lewis Hamilton won the China sprint race but otherwise has not been on the podium.
Baku’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix might provide an opportunity to claim a victory but attention for most teams has now shifted to next season and the rule change which promises to reset the competitive order.
When asked how he keeps himself motivated in a season like this, Leclerc said: “Because I love this team very much, I think that’s the answer.
“I’ve always loved Ferrari and that’s where I draw my motivation from, because I want to bring back Ferrari to the top, no matter how long it takes, and I’ll do absolutely everything until I stop believing in the project.
“But at the moment I’m fully into it, I’m fully working on it, and that’s what motivates me, and of course that doesn’t erase the disappointment that I’ve had at the beginning of the season when I saw that we were quite a few steps behind McLaren, but then you reset and you find your motivation in other goals, in other targets, which is now to hopefully get a win this year.
“It’s underwhelming compared to where we wanted to be, but it’s the situation we’re in, and as a driver I’ve got to make the best out of this situation, not only for the team but also for myself, and I’m very competitive as well, so the fact that we’ve got two cars is also something that pushes me to keep being at the top of my game, and to keep improving, so on that I really don’t like any motivation, I mean I’m super motivated, but as I said, of course the disappointment was there at the beginning of the season.”
The hype earlier in the year was spurred on by two factors — one being the arrival of seven-time world champion Hamilton as Leclerc’s teammate, and the other being that Ferrari finished last season one overtake away from beating McLaren to the constructors’ title. Ferrari has still not won an F1 championship of any kind since the constructors’ in 2008.
Leclerc is no stranger to the emotional rollercoaster at the Italian team, having joined in 2019. The team is often subject to huge expectations but more often than not over the past decade and a half that excitement has given way to disappointment.
When asked if that will always be part of the Ferrari story, he said: “I’m not sure what the future holds, but I’m pretty sure that Ferrari will hold its history and its iconic status, which comes obviously with a lot of hype, a lot of expectations, and it’s up to us to manage it in a better way, I mean I don’t think that this should be in any way an excuse of not performing.
“Ferrari has had so much success, and it’s not like when they’ve had that success they didn’t have the hype that came with it. So yeah, I mean, I think it will stay like that, and I think as a team it’s just a matter of not really focussing and hearing the noise around the team, but just be focused on our own thing, and this is what I’ve been doing since I started with the team.
“Obviously in 2019 was a little bit more difficult because I was young, everything was new, everything was new and there was also a lot of hype on just me being in red for my second year in Formula 1 was just very special.
“But since then it’s important to do a step back and to not always react on emotions and on what’s being said around. I think it’s very important to just stay focused, and on that I think we are doing a good job, but not good enough because we must be back at winning soon.”
